The Lecture on The Cantos of Ezra Pound
A Work in Progress
18
Having run out of time in his second lecture, on Catullus, and left for another time his thoughts on Ariadne as Lesbia as H.D., for his third lecture, Glenn Hughes began by discussing The Cantos.
“Pound begins his epic with a voyage. Let me quote the first lines:
“And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,
Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also
Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward
Bore us out onward with bellying canvas,
Circe’s this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.”
Hughes was an accomplished actor, somewhat of a ham, and he recited poetry well having a good ear for rhythm and able to adopt the voice of a bard.
“Pound is following in the tradition of the epic poets starting with Homer. In many epic poems, such as Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid, a descent into the Underworld comes in the middle of the story. Pound differs in that he starts with a journey to the Underworld. Pound is also different from those earlier epic poets in that he emerges from the Underworld into a world much larger than Homer, Virgil or Dante knew. He also goes back into the Underworld later in the poem! You can make it through the first Canto with a good Classical education and a familiarity with Homer. Read many more of the Cantos and you’ll quickly discover that knowing just the Classics is insufficient to understand Pound.”
“And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea…”
“The ambiguous first lines might apply to a ship manned either by the Argonauts or Odysseus and his crew. The crew are tearful so perhaps the reader would incline more to Odysseus. Both Jason and Odysseus departed from Circe’s Isle. Only gradually do we realize Pound is reenacting a scene from Homer’s Odyssey where Odysseus goes into the Underworld. Tiresias will prophesy Odysseus’ fate, and it is a fate that resembles Pound’s own life:
“Odysseus
“Shalt return through spiteful Neptune, over dark seas,
“Lose all companions.”
“So what are The Cantos about? Could we get a screenplay out of them? Even more than Catullus, Pound makes demands on his readers to comprehend a vast amount of subject matter. Like Catullus, he is commenting on the situation around him by interweaving myth with factual history to make his points. Unlike Catullus, he references more than ancient Greek mythology. He assumes you are familiar with much of the history of Medieval Europe during the time of the troubadours. He assumes that you have read Robert Browning’s Sordello, which he thought was a recent example of epic. He widens the reach of his imagery as he develops the epic to encompass Confucian China, starting with cryptic references to So-Shu, a Han dynasty poet, as early as the second Canto. In his second reference to So-Shu in that Canto, he joins Chinese and Greek imagery together, contrasting an image of a poet caught in a whirlpool at sea with Poseidon causing the whirlpool:
“And So-Shu churned in the sea, So-Shu also,
using the long moon for a churn-stick
Lithe turning of water,
sinews of Poseidon…”
He is using words to evoke a cinematic split screen type of image. In the second Canto he introduced Robert Browning and integrated Browning’s epic into the history of epic. He is including the Chinese in that history. The Han dynasty lasted about 400 years and overlapped the transition of Rome from Republic to Empire. Pound is going to keep bouncing back and forth between cultures as his own epic develops.”
“Let’s look at one poem in particular, Canto 16.” Hughes had distributed carbon copies of the poem plus a commentary. “This prepares to talk about World War One. We first emerge from Dante’s vision of hell to Pound’s vision of purgatory: William Blake,” picking up a copy of The Cantos to read aloud:
“shouting, whirling his arms, the swift limbs,
Howling against the evil,
his eyes rolling,
Whirling like flaming cart-wheels,
and his head held backward to gaze on the evil
As he ran from it…”
“It is very visual poetry but, to be honest, can we do a better job than his own words if we want to show on stage or depict on film a man terrified of being caught by demons from Hell who are chasing him? Pound presents much more of a challenge to make into a screenplay than Catullus.”
“Canto 16 comes to focus on the war in the trenches of World War One and the Russian Revolution. Pound saw Fascism, which has its roots in Roman culture, as salvation for civilization. As The Cantos develops his theme increasingly becomes the history of money and topics such as the accepted exchange rate of silver coins for gold and the interest rates levied on loans. So what are the Cantos about? You all know that he was saved from possible execution by being judged insane. Perhaps genius is a form of insanity? I do think Pound is like a Theseus who has lost his way coming from the Minotaur’s lair. When I got him to read Canto 16 to me, he gave a most dramatic reading, especially the section in French, followed by Ezra imitating a Russian speaking English, obscuring with comedy a very serious subject. He ended on a note of infinite sadness,” picking up the book again to quote:
“So we used to hear it at the opera,
That they wouldn’t be under Haig;
and that the advance was beginning;
That it was going to begin in a week.”
“While Aldington was fighting in the trenches, Pound was in England and, for some of the time, with Yeats, in a cottage in Sussex. He had tried to enlist in the British Army but had been turned down. He had to be a non-combatant while so many of his generation, including close friends, died. I think Pound lost Ariadne’s thread because of World War One and is still searching for a way out of the labyrinth.”
“Probably the best way to depict him in a screenplay would be as an Editor. He’s reading his way through old books and papers in all shapes and sizes, cutting and pasting everything into one long narrative that he tries to summarize in a poem. Each of the cuttings and pastings could be an episode in a movie. Pound was a supremely good editor, “el miglio fabbro/the better smith”, according to the dedication given to The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot, but it is possible he over edited his own work. His factual history requires a vast amount of scholarship to appreciate, unless it is explained by footnotes. Unfortunately, he’s chosen not to provide footnotes. Perhaps he doesn’t realize that footnotes can further embellish a work of art! Not all classicists are historians. Not all historians are economists. Whatever their expertise, few have studied their equivalent discipline in Japanese and Chinese literature.”
“We don’t have the technology today to portray The Cantos as a screenplay. To do so, we would need to immerse the audience in the narrative giving them multiple screens of information that they could choose to magnify or not in order to better view them. It is almost as if we need to allow the audience to have reference materials at hand, perhaps they listen to through headphones, so that they can understand what is happening on the screen or on stage. But it would be very avant garde. Pound often just throws the reader a phrase or a word that encapsulates some idea he thinks is crucial to his narrative but he doesn’t give much help to those of us who lack his depth of scholarship. I think a script would have to come up with a way to handle that, possibly through flashbacks, it is a challenge. At some point, it becomes like trying to make a screenplay out of an encyclopedia. A very tough assignment.”
Dick Russell © Richard M Russell
2025
